As products age, it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain parts needed to repair the products. Sometimes, it is necessary to reverse engineer an integrated circuit (IC), but such a task is difficult.
Destructive and non-destructive techniques such as SEM imaging, IR and X-ray techniques can be used to image an integrated circuit (IC) and produce a low level netlist that represents the circuitry in the IC. However, this extracted netlist is a raw netlist at the element level, i.e., resistor, capacitor, inductor and transistor levels. For large and complex ICs it is extremely hard if not impossible to understand this low level netlist in its raw form or even in the gate or cell level form. In order to understand the functionality of the IC or whether the IC is compromised, the netlist needs to be converted to a higher level form.